Anisotropic hadronic rescattering and its impact on yield, and polarization observable
Phys. Rev. C 114, 014909 – Published 21 July, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xkcg-v2pp
Abstract
In this work, we investigate the anisotropic suppression of reconstructed resonances arising from hadronic rescattering using A Multi-Phase Transport (AMPT) model for collisions at GeV. We demonstrate that the rescattering probability of the decay daughters depends strongly on the decay angle due to Lorentz boost effects, which lead to smaller laboratory-frame momenta for daughters emitted opposite to the parent particle motion. This anisotropic suppression influences several experimentally measured observables. We show that the reconstructed yield exhibits a strong dependence. Furthermore, the anisotropic loss of resonances modifies the angular distributions used to extract the spin alignment parameter in the production-plane and helicity frames. Even in the absence of intrinsic polarization in the model, the reconstructed sample shows deviations of from the unpolarized value of , with opposite trends in the two reference frames. These results demonstrate that hadronic rescattering can generate apparent polarization signals and must be carefully considered in experimental measurements of vector-meson spin alignment using production plane and helicity frames.